Monday, December 22, 2014

http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0001750552
Apology for inappropriate expressions used in comfort women articles
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12:00 am, December 16, 2014
The Japan News
An in-house review has found that The Daily Yomiuri (hereafter referred to as the DY, and now The Japan News) used “sex slave” and other inappropriate expressions in a total of 97 articles from February 1992 to January 2013 in its reporting on the issue of so-called comfort women.

The Japan News apologizes for having used these misleading expressions and will add a note stating that they were inappropriate to all the articles in question in our database. We also have a list of the articles on our website (the-japan-news.com).

The Yomiuri Shimbun (Japanese edition) likewise expressed an apology in its Friday edition.

Among articles related to the comfort women issue — those translated from Yomiuri Shimbun stories and DY original stories — there are 85 articles in which “sex slave” and other words with the same meaning were used in an inappropriate manner.

The expression “comfort women” was difficult to understand for non-Japanese who did not have knowledge of the subject. Therefore the DY, based on an inaccurate perception and using foreign news agencies’ reports as reference, added such explanations as “women who were forced into sexual slavery” that did not appear in The Yomiuri Shimbun’s original stories.

For example, the Henshu Techo front page column carried in The Yomiuri Shimbun’s edition for Aug. 30, 1997, contained the words “about descriptions of comfort women and others.” However, “Jottings,” the DY’s translated version of the column, said, “the issue of ‘comfort women,’ who were forced into sexual servitude by the Imperial Japanese Army.”

There were also 12 articles that did not use “sex slave” or other words with that meaning, but defined comfort women in such terms as “forced into prostitution by the military,” as if coercion by the Japanese government or the army was an objective fact.

A statement on comfort women issued in 1993 by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono stated that “.... at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments [of comfort women].” The meaning was accurately presented by the DY initially.

However, the DY later simplified the meaning of the statement into, for example, “The government admitted that the Imperial Japanese Army forcibly recruited women” and used misleading expressions in some cases.

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The following is the list of the DY articles which contain inappropriate expressions (The headlines with the date of publication in the parentheses):

Japan Denied Revision of UN Comfort Women Report
The Japanese government’s request to amend a 1996 U.N. special rapporteur’s report on comfort women was denied.

ankit-panda
By Ankit Panda
October 17, 2014

According to a statement by government spokesman Yoshihide Suga on Thursday, the Japanese government asked the United Nations to partially retract an old United Nations report detailing abuses against Korean and other women who were forced to work as “comfort women” during the Second World War. The government’s request was rejected by the report’s author. The revelation comes amid a broader trend in Japan where conservative politicians have challenged the veracity of international claims regarding how the Imperial Japanese Army treated women in Korea and elsewhere during the war. Suga did not specify what sections of the report were in question.

The report, authored by former U.N. special rapporteur Radhika Coomaraswamy in 1996, called on Japan to apologize to the victims and pay reparations to survivors who had been forced into sex slavery during the war. The report was authored after Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono issued a statement in 1993 sharing the conclusions of a Japanese government study that declared that the Imperial Japanese Army was culpable of forcing women — mostly Koreans and Chinese — into sexual slavery. Kono’s statement included an apology and has been under criticism by some Japanese conservatives. For example, current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, during his first term in 2007, stated that he did not believe that the women were necessarily forced into sexual slavery, sparking controversy at the time. Though Abe has recently been less willing to explicitly contradict the Kono statement, remarks from within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party suggest that the Kono statement could be amended in the future. That his administration would now try to revise the U.N. special rapporteurs’ report is evidence that Abe’s government is likely pandering to a small but considerably influential conservative political base in Japan.

South Korea condemned the Japanese government’s attempt to revise the report. Noh Kwang-il, spokesman for the South Korean Foreign Ministry, remarked, “However hard the Japanese government tries to distort the true nature of the comfort women issue and play down or hide the past wrongdoings, it will never be able to whitewash history.” The domestic debate on the issue in Japan was transformed this summer when the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, a left-leaning publication, issued a retraction of several articles it had published on the issue of sex slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army that were based on a discredited source. Japanese conservatives took this to vindicate their apprehension about the international consensus on the issue. Despite the Asahi Shimbun‘s retraction, the testimonies of numerous survivors of sexual slavery under the Imperial Japanese Army — particularly South Korean survivors — continue to resonate in the region.

Historical issues are a particular inhibitor to closer ties between Northeast Asian states. In particular, relations between South Korea and Japan have been chilly ever since Shinzo Abe returned to power in December 2012. South Korea continues to demand that Japan resolve the “comfort women” issue ”effectively and in a way that is agreeable to the living victims.” Issues like historical revisionism on the comfort women issue are non-negotiable for the South Korean government. Beyond the government, public opinion of Japan, particularly the government under Abe, is at historic lows in South Korea.

"The Pope returned the Comfort Women discussion to where it belongs—which is to comfort the victims."
Mindy Kotler
August 31, 2014

Before his final mass in South Korea on August 18, Pope Francis met with seven elderly ladies who had been Comfort Women. As teenagers during World War II they were trafficked by Imperial Japan to be sex slaves. Military records on the operation of a comfort station show that the girls had to service not only soldiers and sailors, but also Japanese government and corporate officials.

The Pope bent down and clasped the frail hands of each woman. One offered him a butterfly pin, a symbol of their lost innocence, which the Pontiff immediately fastened to his vestments and wore throughout the service. Prior to the mass, he was handed a letter from the Dutch former Comfort Woman, Jan Ruff O’Herne, who at 92 could not travel from her home in Australia to meet him. She wanted him to know that before she was chosen by Japanese Army officers in her concentration camp on Java and raped in a Semarang military brothel, her dream was to become a nun.

The women received more than the Pope’s blessing. They received affirmation that their history was believed and their suffering real. Francis has championed the elimination of human trafficking and preached on the evils of sexual slavery. By a simple gesture, he included their experience with all victims caught up in sexual violence. He understands that rape is a weapon of subjugation and humiliation. Unlike Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, the Pontiff does not rationalize the Comfort Women experience with “the 20th century was a century where many human rights were violated.”

Equally important, Pope Francis has helped internationalize and humanize the issue. The Abe administration has framed the Comfort Women issue entirely as a history problem with South Korea. The truth is that women throughout the Indo-Pacific region were the victims of the Imperial Army and Navy. The stories the women tell from the Andaman Islands to New Guinea, by Dutch gentry to Taiwanese aboriginals are shockingly similar.

As contemporary research has shown, sexual violence in conflict affects whole communities and generations. Recently, a Dutch woman came forward describing how as a four-year-old she waited daily on the steps of St. Xavier Church in the concentration camp at Moentilan, Java for her mother. Only as an adult did she learn that her mother’s lifetime nightmares were from being repeatedly raped by Japanese officers who had made the Church their headquarters. The mother was one of many “uncounted” Comfort Women.

Francis tacitly confirmed that the issue is not one of politics or diplomacy, as Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga repeats. But it is also not one of history as Suga and Abe want us to believe. Instead, it is a timeless humanitarian concern that can only be resolved through humanitarian action. The Pope returned the Comfort Women discussion to where it belongs—which is to comfort the victims.

But the Abe government has politicized the Comfort Women issue. The most unsettling omission in the Abe administration’s discourse on the Comfort Women is the failure to acknowledge the Batavia War Crimes trials. A 1947 Tribunal found a number of Japanese officers guilty of entering a civilian internment camp to forcibly select thirty-five girls and bring them in military vehicles to a military brothel in Semarang (Indonesia). The Batavia trial thus recognized the "forced prostitution" (to use the Dutch government's terminology) of women as a war crime.

Oddly, in 2013, there was a Cabinet Decision admitting that the trial documents were part of the official Japanese government records supporting the Kono Statement. These did not seem to have been considered in the recent government “review” of how the Statement was drafted. Instead, the Abe Government continues to parse the traumatic memories of Korean former Comfort Women and Japanese soldiers looking for discrepancies to question this sordid history.

The omission can lead to the disturbing conclusion that discrediting the Comfort Women, no matter the evidence, has a greater goal. This is to set aside any legal record or proceeding prosecuting Japan’s war criminals. The ease at which the Batavia trial verdict has been disregarded has implications for the verdicts of all the hundreds of war crimes trials throughout the Pacific after the war, especially the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.

Undoing the postwar regime and its “masochistic” history is a stated objective of the Abe administration. The path to regaining Japanese pride and independence, according to Mr. Abe and many in his administration, means not accepting the results of the Tokyo Tribunal and not being a victim to its “victor’s justice.” By ignoring the Batavia verdicts, the Abe government takes the first step to challenge the decisions of The Tribunal.

Paying homage at Yasukuni, the spiritual symbol of Imperial Japan is a ritualistic swipe at the Tokyo Tribunal. Yasukuni, where hundreds of war criminals are deified, which hosts a museum that celebrates Japan’s “liberation” of Asia and small shrines to the likes of the Kempeitai, does not accept Japan’s defeat or the condemnation of its war criminals. Thus, a visit or an offering sent is less about mourning than about a gesture as powerful as the Pope’s in affirming a certain point of view as fact.

"The Pope returned the Comfort Women discussion to where it belongs—which is to comfort the victims."
Mindy Kotler
August 31, 2014

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In the end, it is not about the dead. As the Pope showed, it is the living that need peace. Maybe Abe should spend less time with the dead. At every international visit, the prime minister has made a point of visiting war memorials. On his recent trip to Papua New Guinea, Abe visited two memorials to Japan’s fallen at Wewak. He made no mention of how this horrific final campaign descended into barbarism and cannibalism. Nor was there mention of the thousands of POWs, mainly Indian and Australian, killed through starvation, overwork, disease or target-practice on the island.

At this year’s August 15th anniversary for Japan’s war dead, Abe, unlike past prime ministers, made no mention of apology for Japan’s aggression. Again, this is viewed as a rejection of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal’s judgments.

Central to Japan’s peace treaty with the Allied governments in 1951, was acceptance of the verdicts of the Tokyo Tribunal. Abe’s rallying the dead to abandon the Tribunal’s verdicts does not engender trust among Japan’s allies or foes. Thus, it is time for Prime Minister Abe to make an important gesture to reassure his critics. He can affirm that he has no plans to ignore or repudiate the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Saying that he, for now, inherits the Murayama apology—he walked out of a parliamentary vote on this apology in 1995—is not enough. He needs to embrace these ideas.

Pope Francis’ quiet inclusion of the Comfort Women in his mass was a humanitarian gesture. It was an acceptance that no woman at any place or time should be subjected to the mercy of her captors. The political debate over Comfort Women to exonerate Imperial Japan’s war conduct has been damaging to modern Japan’s international image. Prime Minister Abe is best advised to affirm the verdicts of history and offer an unequivocal humanitarian response to the surviving Comfort Women in Korea and in other places.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Rewriting the War, Japanese Right Attacks a Newspaper
By MARTIN FACKLERDEC. 2, 2014
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Takashi Uemura, a former journalist, is under attack for his reporting on “comfort women.” Credit Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
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SAPPORO, Japan — Takashi Uemura was 33 when he wrote the article that would make his career. Then an investigative reporter for The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second-largest newspaper, he examined whether the Imperial Army had forced women to work in military brothels during World War II. His report, under the headline “Remembering Still Brings Tears,” was one of the first to tell the story of a former “comfort woman” from Korea.

Fast-forward a quarter century, and that article has made Mr. Uemura, now 56 and retired from journalism, a target of Japan’s political right. Tabloids brand him a traitor for disseminating “Korean lies” that they say were part of a smear campaign aimed at settling old scores with Japan. Threats of violence, Mr. Uemura says, have cost him one university teaching job and could soon rob him of a second. Ultranationalists have even gone after his children, posting Internet messages urging people to drive his teenage daughter to suicide.

The threats are part of a broad, vitriolic assault by the right-wing news media and politicians here on The Asahi, which has long been the newspaper that Japanese conservatives love to hate. The battle is also the most recent salvo in a long-raging dispute over Japan’s culpability for its wartime behavior that has flared under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s right-leaning government.

This latest campaign, however, has gone beyond anything postwar Japan has seen before, with nationalist politicians, including Mr. Abe himself, unleashing a torrent of abuse that has cowed one of the last strongholds of progressive political influence in Japan. It has also emboldened revisionists calling for a reconsideration of the government’s 1993 apology for the wartime coercion of women into prostitution.

“They are using intimidation as a way to deny history,” said Mr. Uemura, who spoke with a pleading urgency and came to an interview in this northern city with stacks of papers to defend himself. “They want to bully us into silence.”

“The War on The Asahi,” as commentators have called it, began in August when the newspaper bowed to public criticism and retracted at least a dozen articles published in the 1980s and early ’90s. Those articles cited a former soldier, Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have helped abduct Korean women for the military brothels. Mr. Yoshida was discredited two decades ago, but the Japanese right pounced on The Asahi’s gesture and called for a boycott to drive the 135-year-old newspaper out of business.

Speaking to a parliamentary committee in October, Mr. Abe said The Asahi’s “mistaken reporting had caused many people injury, sorrow, pain and anger. It wounded Japan’s image.”

With elections this month, analysts say conservatives are trying to hobble the nation’s leading left-of-center newspaper. The Asahi has long supported greater atonement for Japan’s wartime militarism and has opposed Mr. Abe on other issues. But it is increasingly isolated as the nation’s liberal opposition remains in disarray after a crushing defeat at the polls two years ago.

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Mr. Abe and his political allies have also seized on The Asahi’s woes as a long-awaited chance to go after bigger game: the now internationally accepted view that the Japanese military coerced tens of thousands of Korean and other foreign women into sexual slavery during the war.

Most mainstream historians agree that the Imperial Army treated women in conquered territories as spoils of battle, rounding them up to work in a system of military-run brothels known as comfort stations that stretched from China to the South Pacific. Many were deceived with offers of jobs in factories and hospitals and then forced to provide sex for imperial soldiers in the comfort stations. In Southeast Asia, there is evidence that Japanese soldiers simply kidnapped women to work in the brothels.

Among the women who have come forward to say they were forced to have sex with soldiers are Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos, as well as Dutch women captured in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.

There is little evidence that the Japanese military abducted or was directly involved in entrapping women in Korea, which had been a Japanese colony for decades when the war began, although the women and activists who support them say the women were often deceived and forced to work against their will.

The revisionists, however, have seized on the lack of evidence of abductions to deny that any women were held captive in sexual slavery and to argue that the comfort women were simply camp-following prostitutes out to make good money.

For scholars of the comfort women issue, the surprise was not The Asahi’s conclusion that Mr. Yoshida had lied — the newspaper acknowledged in 1997 that it could not verify his account — but that it waited so long to issue a formal retraction. Employees at The Asahi said it finally acted because members of the Abe government had been using the articles to criticize its reporters, and it hoped to blunt the attacks by setting the record straight.

Instead, the move prompted a storm of denunciations and gave the revisionists a new opening to promote their version of history. They are also pressing a claim that has left foreign experts scratching their heads in disbelief: that The Asahi alone is to blame for persuading the world that the comfort women were victims of coercion.

Though dozens of women have come forward with testimony about their ordeals, the Japanese right contends it was The Asahi’s reporting that resulted in international condemnation of Japan, including a 2007 resolution by the United States House of Representatives calling on Japan to apologize for “one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century.”

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For conservatives, humbling The Asahi is also a way to advance their long-held agenda of erasing portrayals of Imperial Japan that they consider too negative and eventually overturning the 1993 apology to comfort women, analysts say. Many on the right have argued that Japan’s behavior was no worse than that of other World War II combatants, including the United States’ bombing of Japanese civilians.

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“The Asahi’s admission is a chance for the revisionist right to say: ‘See! We told you so!’ ” said Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo. “Abe sees this as his chance to go after a historical issue that he believes has hurt Japan’s national honor.”

The Asahi’s conservative competitor, The Yomiuri Shimbun, the world’s highest-circulation newspaper, has capitalized on its rival’s troubles by distributing leaflets that highlight The Asahi’s mistakes in reporting on comfort women. Since August, The Asahi’s daily circulation has dropped by 230,797 to about seven million, according to the Japan Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Right-wing tabloids have gone further, singling out Mr. Uemura as a “fabricator of the comfort women” even though his article was not among those that The Asahi retracted.

Mr. Uemura said The Asahi had been too fearful to defend him, or even itself. In September, the newspaper’s top executives apologized on television and fired the chief editor.

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“Abe is using The Asahi’s problems to intimidate other media into self-censorship,” said Jiro Yamaguchi, a political scientist who helped organize a petition to support Mr. Uemura. “This is a new form of McCarthyism.”

Hokusei Gakuen University, a small Christian college where Mr. Uemura lectures on local culture and history, said it was reviewing his contract because of bomb threats by ultranationalists. On a recent afternoon, some of Mr. Uemura’s supporters gathered to hear a sermon warning against repeating the mistakes of the dark years before the war, when the nation trampled dissent.

Mr. Uemura did not attend, explaining that he was now reluctant to appear in public. “This is the right’s way of threatening other journalists into silence,” he said. “They don’t want to suffer the same fate that I have.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 3, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rewriting War, Japanese Right Goes on Attack. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe